In analytical laboratories, in particular clinical laboratories, a multitude of analyses on biological samples are executed in order to determine physiological and biochemical states of patients being indicative of a disease, nutrition habits, drug effectiveness or organ function.
Biological samples used in those analyses can be a number of different biological fluids such as blood, urine, cerebral-spinal fluid, saliva etc. These original biological samples may further be aliquoted or divided into multiple biological samples.
Modern clinical laboratories may use networks of analytical devices to automatically analyze biological samples.
Disadvantages of the current automated systems for analyzing biological samples include that there are real-time dependencies among analytical devices or subsystems of the laboratory automated system and that there may be single point-of-failure dependencies.